Dinner disrupted: Site wants to sell you a reservation

Diners line up for a table the old-fashioned way. (Photo: San Francisco Chronicle)

If you thought paying for a public parking space was strange, imagine forking over a wad of cash for a hard-to-get restaurant reservation.

That’s the idea behind Reservationhop.com, a startup that makes reservations at San Francisco’s most popular restaurants and then sells them back to the public “for as little as $5.”

The way it works, according to the website, is that you log in up to four hours before you want to dine and the app will tell you where it has gobbled up reservations.

If you see one that tickles your palate, snatch it up and, once your payment has been confirmed, they’ll give you the, presumably fake, name to give to the host or hostess at the restaurant.

Some Friday reservations listed on the site: dinner at La Mar Cebicheria Peruana for $10, Scala’s Bistro for $8 or, if you like the idea of paying for something that you could previously get for free but can’t afford $8 or $10, a dinner for two at Zero Zero can be yours for $5.

Also worth noting is that reservations for many of the restaurants featured on the site can be obtained, at no charge, on sites like opentable.com.

Reservationhop.com comes closely on the heels of the ongoing Monkey Parking debacle, in which an app attempting to auction off public parking spaces was issued a cease-and-desist letter from City Attorney Dennis Herrera. That app’s CEO is disputing the order.

In a city already fed up with new technology attempting to disrupt its way into profits, it’s difficult to imagine how an app that effectively makes reservations more scarce and thus harder to get — all in the name of money — would be met with anything but hostility.

But, as of 3 p.m. Thursday, at least one reservation on the site’s homepage had been claimed, so somebody’s using it.

Update:

While Brian Mayer, the entrepreneur who said he built the site as an experiment, didn’t respond to a request for comment, he did pen a lengthy blog post in response to the overwhelmingly negative response Reservationhop.com received Thursday. He titled it “How I Became the Most Hated Person In San Francisco For A Day.”

Mayer wrote that he hadn’t given a lot of thought to the legal and ethical questions of selling a commodity that had previously been free, at one point asking rhetorically, “If someone does pay for it willingly, is it really unethical?”

“The consumer has made a choice, the reservation stands, the restaurant gets a table filled as planned, and I have made money for providing the service,” he wrote.

He went on to write that it wasn’t his intention to take money away from restaurants and that he’ll be reaching out to some places in the near future to seek out partnerships.

Many of the reservations users can claim on Reservationhop.com are eateries featured in Michael Bauer’s list of the Bay Area’s top 100 restaurants. Here’s the complete list of featured dishes, in case you could use a recap.